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St
Cuthbert, Sprowston, Norwich

This
pretty little church in the pleasant suburbia of
the Sprowston Road was built in the 1880s as a
chapel of ease to Sprowston's elegant and
beautiful medieval parish church of St Mary and
St Margaret, right out on the very edge of the
city. As is often the way with such things, it
soon took on a life of its own and developed its
own community, while continuing to work closely
with the mother church. The architect was one ARG
Fleming, who I am not aware of coming across
elsewhere in Norfolk, and the church is a simple,
aisleless hall church in red brick and timber,
with a functional west front.

In the
1990s, an extension to the north containing
meeting rooms and a kitchen was added, in exactly
the same way as at St Mary Magdalen further into
town. Most encouragingly for a suburban church,
St Cuthbert is open for private prayer and to
casual visitors every day, and as at St Mary
Magdalen you enter the church through the
extension.

The
interior of the church is a little like being inside a
vast upturned boat, a pleasing reminder that the very
word 'nave' comes from the same Latin root, navus,
meaning a boat, as the words 'navy' and 'naval'. There is
a sense of great space inside the church. Simply, it
feels bigger than it is. The line of nave and chancel is
unbroken, and there are no arcades to form aisles. The
windows on both sides are quite low down, and the great
roof lifts high above them.

I was
really pleased to meet the friendly churchwarden of St
Cuthbert - he dropped by to turn the heating on for a
drama group in the hall, and we soon got to chatting
about the church. He obviously loved it dearly, and knew
it inside out. It made such a great contrast with my
unpleasant experience at St George nearer into town a
short while earlier. He told me that there had been
considerable alterations here in the early 1990s.
Firstly, the entire east end of the interior was altered
- the screens and vestries had been taken out, and the
sanctuary reordered away from the east wall. A beautiful
reredos depicting the imagery of St Cuthbert had been
painted by local people. The woodwork from the screens
and vestries had been used to build an elegant gallery at
the west end of the church, and the organ, previously in
the south-east corner, was now up in the gallery. Best of
all, beneath it had been built a little chapel for
private prayer; it opens opposite the entrance from the
extension, "so people can come in off the street and
have a little quiet time in the presence of the
Lord", my new acquaintance said.

This
explained the simplicity and openness of the east end,
flooded with light and a sense of the numinous. It was
brilliantly done.

As
you have probably guessed, I really like this
church a lot. And while St Cuthbert is obviously
the beating heart of a living and breathing faith
community, there were two ghosts of the past
which also pleased me immensely. The first of
these I would not have noticed if it had not been
pointed out to me. The unaltered windows on the
south side (those to the north form doors and
openings into the new extension) retain the cast
iron fittings for the Second World War blackout.
They were never removed.

Secondly,
the fine medieval font here came from lost and
lonely Kempstone, way out
in the woods on the edge of the Breckland. The
church there was abandoned finally in the 1960s,
and because it is on private land the ruin is
little known. But I had been there, and the
contrast between that remote spot and this dear
place was for a moment breathtaking; and then, as
I thought about it, not so much a fracture as a
thread down the years, and the font itself a
touchstone to the long Norfolk generations.